Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey

by Lori Perkins

  Romance, undivided attention, and being desired beyond our wildest dreams are all known to get our juices flowing, but there is one more thing that makes the Byronic hero irresistible: he resonates with the female fantasy of bad boy reformation. Ana’s dilemma is age old: “He’s not a hero; he’s a man with serious, deep emotional flaws, and he’s dragging me into the dark. Can I not guide him into the light?” Ah yes, the thoughts of every girl in love with every bad boy since the beginning of time. What makes Christian different from that tattooed guy with the motorcycle you dated senior year of high school just to piss off your parents is that this beautiful and broken man is flawed but willing to change. His admission that he is “fifty shades of fucked up” gives us hope that, with a little faith and some patience, any flawed man can be saved. By nature, it is his very brokenness that makes this otherwise “unobtainable” man attainable. The fact that this ridiculously handsome, powerful, wealthy, and kind man could fall for any one of us if we took the time to care, took the time to save him, is appealing on multiple levels. Christian Grey is perfect in his imperfections because we want to save him and be saved in the process. Ana says, “There’s nothing I can teach him. I have no special skills,” but ends up teaching him the most valuable lesson of all: how to love and be loved in return. She becomes his lifeline; in the end love saves the day.

  It is a beautiful thought that love really can conquer all, and it is obvious that Fifty Shades is an erotic, modern fairy tale complete with happy ending (no pun intended). However, merely establishing that Christian Grey is a Byronic hero and discussing the overall appeal of these characters still does not explain the insane obsession with him. He is just one on a list of many dark, sexy, brooding literary hunks.

  So why the astounding, inescapable popularity of the Fifty Shades series? The novels are not well written; in fact, many would argue they are poorly written. Grammatical and punctuation errors abound, Britishisms pop up all over Seattle, and redundancy runs rampant. Yet, much to the chagrin of many academics, literary critics, and general condemners of erotic fiction, this series is resonating with people unlike any book I’ve ever seen. When I taught Effective Reading to college freshman, I would always tell my students: “If you think you don’t like to read, you just haven’t found the right book.” Whether we like it or not, Fifty Shades of Grey has become “the right book” for millions of people, the majority of whom are women. Am I advocating its addition to the literary canon? Do I think it should appear on every Brit Lit reading list? Of course not. Actually, I shudder at the thought. But just because it isn’t on par with Shakespeare or Austen and Brontë doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Fifty Shades is clearly meeting a need in the literary market by giving its reader exactly what she wants: sex and lots of it.

  This series is successful because James has given the reader her ultimate fantasy: experiencing the Byronic hero in the bedroom. What woman wouldn’t want to read (in explicit detail) what happened after Rhett carried Scarlett up those stairs? Or what Darcy and Elizabeth’s wedding night was like? Jane’s sex life after Mr. Rochester regained his sight? Christian Grey epitomizes the sexy, brooding hero that women want and the love life that goes along with him. It is no longer left to our imagination. We get to hear the rip of every condom packet, every moan, every breath. We get to feel every touch and relish each caress. For the first time we get the hedonism along with the happily-ever-after. Cliché? Sure, but the cliché exists because of our common desires. Christian Grey is all of our fantasies wrapped into one.

  As it turns out, deep down we’re all a little “sex mad and insatiable.” We want it all. We want the love and the lust. We want a man who will dance with us to Sinatra, take us soaring, and buy us our 12,000-square-foot dream home overlooking the Sound. We want the guy who can say, “I want you sore, baby” one minute and make love to the music of Roberta Flack the next. The guy who will whisk you around the world, drench you in diamonds, outfit you in designer duds from Louboutin to La Perla, reenact the piano scene from Pretty Woman, and make you come on demand. (Seriously, he says, “Come on, baby,” and poof, magic orgasms!) A loving, committed relationship with a hottie billionaire who is good in bed? Who turns out to be a spectacular father and still thinks you’re sexy when you’re bloated and pregnant? Who only asks for the occasional spanking in return? Hello!! Where do I sign up? With Christian Grey, we get to fall in love with the reckless bad boy who wants us mind, body, and soul, and we get to experience him in the bedroom. Dreams really do come true, “kinky fuckery” included.

  JENNIFER SANZO holds a BA in English from Seton Hall University and a Masters from William Paterson University. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Ann Seton Women’s Studies Writing Prize, a published poet, and former English professor. Jennifer lives in Rochester, New York, with her husband and two children.

  KATHARINE SANDS

  Grey Is the New Black

  FADE IN:

  Somewhere …

  In a fantasy far, far away …

  We see Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City apartment (circa the TV show), New York City.

  Next to a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, we see Carrie Bradshaw’s fingers whisk across the keyboard as sentences form on her backlit computer screen.

  What is all the fuss about regarding this book?

  Why is Grey the new black?

  • • • • •

  FADE IN:

  Somewhere …

  In your fantasy life—your place, present day …

  Christian Grey’s long, tapered fingers lace his silky silver tie tightly around you, the weave from his tie imprints your flawless skin. You inhale his freshly washed linen scent in a sharp intake of breath as his fictional persona imprints on popular culture and you anticipate the smart of his hand smacking your (roll fantasy sequence, it goes here).

  • • • • •

  DOES THIS AROUSE … your interest, Miss Reader?

  Honey, take a number—these days we’re all “in the kink.”

  Fifty Shades of Grey hit the 20 million mark the week I’m writing this and author E. L. James is signing them from Comic-Con to Costco.

  Never before has one throbbing manhood held a nation in such sexual thrall.

  What is his hold on our collective carnality, uh, I mean, our imaginations?

  Looking at it as a literary agent—one of fifty takes on Grey— my thoughts center on why this is happening. This is the fastest-selling book of all time, yet it might not have been published on its merits alone had it been submitted to an agency slush pile. I decided to look deeper at why the bondage-themed novel is spanking the bestseller list and sparking a publishing phenomenon. What is it about this book that hits the sweet spot: the tipping point where culture really pops?

  Here are a few thoughts on why Fifty Shades really hits the G-spot:

  It is a very fresh and modern tale.

  Fifty Shades tells an erotic story of desire and boundaries, love and dysfunction, trauma and trust issues. Anastasia Steele—who has never known a man’s touch—or noticed she has a clitoris—meets Christian Grey. When Mr. Grey’s steely gray gaze alights on Miss Steele, romance ensues. Guy meets girl. Girl is spirited to his millionaire man cave. Girl is deflowered, awakened, impassioned. Guy offers girl his hand in bondage.

  We also get classic romantic tradition.

  Girl with spirit and pluck meets man of property is ever a panty-peeling premise in the Victorian novel. Literature is riddled with submission/dominance themes. The very tales of literary heroines that our literary heroine, virginal Anastasia Steele, has been steeped in.

  An expert on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women’s novels, Susan Greenfield, calls this hot title recycled literature. Indeed, Fifty Shades revels in the classic romanticism of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and the plot specifically references Thomas Hardy. Echoes of each reverberate through Fifty Shades like the convulsions Christian expertly wrings from Ana with those long tapered fingers … um, where
were we?

  Oh, yes, so Ana’s trio of literary heroines: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jane Eyre, and Elizabeth Bennet form a sort of Sex and the City–like posse for the virgin-turned-BDSM initiate. As she and Grey discuss their contract language and deal points to begin her new life as his submissive, Ana tells the reader, “[Austen’s] Elizabeth Bennet would be outraged, [Brontë’s] Jane Eyre too frightened, and [Hardy’s] Tess would succumb, just as I have.”

  Anastasia Steele went out there an understudy … and she came back a star.

  Steele and Grey have joined the all-star cast of literary couples. The S&M-crossed lovers were first conceived as Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the Twilight duo written as fanfiction for the Twilight fandom. For the literary zeitgeist, we could say that as the erotic trilogy draws on its precursors’ influence, you start to see how Fifty Shades could be called Next Generation Jane Eyre or the literary lovechild of Lizzie and Darcy. We might call them the new Carrie and Mr. Big or something meets Pretty Woman (and that other rich corporate raider guy).

  After all, these are the shades that launched a thousand ‘ships.

  Tess of the d’Urbervilles, referred to throughout the novel, put me in mind of the idea that perhaps the true origins of this trilogy were a term paper that James repurposed; the theme of a woman locked in soulful struggle over passion and power is a clear parallel between the tales. Ana has angel (her inner goddess) and devil (her subconscious) perched on each slender shoulder. While her inner goddess delights, her subconscious judges; when her inner goddess cheers at Ana’s “OMG, he likes me, he really likes me!” attraction for a guy with “scary vices,” her subconscious sneers. They haggle over his hard/soft terms, veering between sense and sensibility—so to speak. Tess, demeaned by a libertine (her cousin) and deified by an idealist (her husband)—true to Hardy’s day, her story says “death before orgasm”—is now updated and re-created in Ana’s conflict.

  Love of Pride and Prejudice prompted Helen Fielding to modernize its plot for her novelization of her “Bridget Jones’s Diary” column. With her mission statement being “simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth,” with the couple as her “chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship.” The viral votes are in: Christian and Ana could now be said to be the new chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or rather courtship.

  Christian Grey is a romantic hero.

  Actually he is a very classic Romantic hero. And he is also a Byronic hero in the classic sense. This means Christian Grey is the quintessential hero of the Victorian literature that Anastasia is studying when the novel opens. He has every requisite for a Byronic hero: he is complex, he is a troubled soul, damaged from—and haunted by—a dark and mysterious past; he is extremely passionate, he exists outside the realm of the “norm.”

  Christian Grey seeks solace and control through micromanaging bondage-style sex. Christian Grey, CEO of Grey Enterprises, may be an all-powerful Pacific Northwest twentysomething magnate, but the vulnerable master of the universe has never known a genuine love connection and he is a virgin, too—to vanilla sex. Until he meets her—and then it is through Ana that Christian seeks sexual redemption.

  In Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, Blogcritics’ Barbara Barnett describes Byronic heroes as “charismatic characters with strong passions and ideals, but who are nonetheless deeply flawed individuals who may act in ways which are socially reprehensible, and whose internal conflicts are heavily romanticized. They are self-destructive and difficult at worst; courageous, intelligent, and noble at their best. Irresistible and magnetic.”

  So we can look to classic literature for the reason why the trilogy has us all by the nerve endings. This is also the answer to why this has become an internet sensation and why Fifty Shades of Grey is being read and embraced by girls coming of age in our era of economic anxiety and hot-mamas-turned-mommies are furtively downloading during the spin cycle.

  Blame it on the Brontës. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights—Cathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Mr. Rochester—are in our romantic DNA. Christian Grey, literary heir to Mr. Rochester (Mr. Rochester hides his wife, the madwoman, in the mansion attic; Mr. Grey keeps his secret BDSM stuff in the man cave playroom), is the Byronic hero for our time.

  Putting aside, of course, that Christian Grey’s phantom-like menace is a portrait of the most literary stalker since Humbert Humbert’s loins lit up for Lo-li-ta. But Fifty Shades is at heart a Cinderella story—perhaps we should think of it as the lost sex scenes of Cinderella.

  E. L. James is redolent of the great doyennes of romance.

  Author James likes to say in every interview that she knows she is not a great writer. But she sure knows how to rip a bodice, and she does it old school. Reading Shades, Georgette Heyer would have swooned from reading such explicit content; Barbara Cart-land would have had the vapors from the fainting couch. But the cleavage-heaving greats would still have to agree E. L. has chops and craft, and holds her readers as the tension mounts …

  • • • • •

  So what if feminists decry the erotic lure of the powerful male over the vulnerable heroine thing? So what if you tend to nod off while waiting for the next sexually charged scene to get pulsing? So what if the book editors seem to have tossed aside their red felt pens and reached for their vibrators? Fifty Shades “gives new meaning to reading for pleasure,” crows Vintage, an imprint of Random House, the publisher of E. L. James—as well as Flaubert.

  Somewhere … in a bookstore, not far from you …

  Madame Bovary just rolled her eyes.

  KATHARINE SANDS is a literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York City. Katharine represents a varied list of authors who publish a diverse array of books. She is “the agent provocateur” of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents, and has written for Writer’s Digest, The Writer Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times.

  For Katharine, watching ideas turn into books is magical—as if elves make them. Highlights include XTC: Song-Stories; Mom’s Choice; Hands off My Belly: The Pregnant Woman’s Guide to Surviving Myths, Mothers and Moods; The Unofficial Guide to House, MD; Dating the Devil by Lia Romeo; The New Rules of Attraction by Arden Leigh; Make Up, Don’t Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil; Writers on Directors; Taxpertise; Under the Hula Moon; The Complete Book on International Adoption: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Child; Ford model Helen Lee’s The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan; New York: Songs of the City; and SAT Word Slam, to name a few.

  HOPE TARR, PHD

  Because Love Hurts

  We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

  —SIGMUND FREUD

  ALL LOVE HURTS. At one point or another, it just does. How could an emotion so exquisite, so transporting, so complex and utterly consuming not be balanced by a shadow side?

  The newly in-love are especially vulnerable, uniquely at risk. Be we sixteen or sixty, it is in forging the dark, unknown, and sometimes dangerous terrain of a new love that we are at our most blind and, yes, our most vulnerable. And yet arguably what makes new love so titillating, so entirely thrilling, so obsessively captivating is its very uncertainty, its implicit and, in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, explicit danger. Will s/he hurt me? Is this going to work out? Can I possibly be … enough, whatever enough may mean?

  Regardless of our sexual appetites, our kink, our desires in and out of the bedroom, when we’re newly in love, we flog ourselves with feelings, excoriate ourselves with doubts. We may appear flawless and totally together on the outside but on the inside … we are raw, we are bleeding. What E. L. James accomplishes in Fifty Shades of Grey is to invite us inside a world where those inner hurts can be manifested in a very real, very tangible, very sexy w
ay: BDSM.

  In Fifty Shades of Grey, mega-mogul Christian Grey offers the young heroine, Ana Steele, an “indecent proposal” in the form of a three-month contract wherein she will be his submissive, his sex slave, and he her Dominant and tutor. Much later in the book (chapter 22), Ana eloquently expresses her internal conflict about their proposed arrangement to Christian.

  “What you are offering is erotic and sexy, and I’m curious, but I’m also scared you’ll hurt me—physically and emotionally. After three months you could say goodbye, and where will that leave me if you do? But then I suppose that risk is there in any relationship.”

  Yes, I suppose it is.

  Love without some risk is like champagne without the fizz—flat, bland, and ultimately discardable. But how much risk is too much? And who in Fifty Shades really has the lion’s share at stake?

  The obvious answer is Ana and certainly on the surface that is so. It is Ana who starts and ends the first book as the vulnerable ingénue to Christian’s jaded sophisticate. It is Ana, after all, who must cope with being whipped and trussed, blindfolded and belted. It is Ana who will require Advil and aloe and cuddling to recover from their encounters. It is Ana who is making all the concessions in their relationship. Or so it seems.

  “I do it for you, Christian, because you need it. I don’t,” she says in the final chapter.

  She may not need to be dominated, in fact she doesn’t need it, and yet she likes it—and likes it fifty shades of a lot. Her true pain isn’t found in the physical discomfort but in her emotional confusion, the cognitive dissonance she feels in being, on a very primal level, aroused by the punishment Christian inflicts. In the aftermath of her first light spanking, she bursts into tears, not because it hurts—of course it hurts!—but because she liked it. In contrast to Christian, who expects to enjoy their kinky encounters, Ana has no cognitive paradigm for interpreting her unanticipated sexual and emotional pleasure. Pain should be purely painful, and so it has always been, at least in her world. Pleasure-pain is a nuance she spends the entirety of the first book in the trilogy struggling to wrap her psyche around. Many of us struggle vicariously with her.